Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"

The English monarchy might be more revered than ever before. Meghan and Harry's wedding drew a massive audience. The Queen's coronavirus message to the people was watched by millions not living in the UK or even the Commonwealth. The Crown is (forgive the pun) one of the crown jewels of prestige television.

In a weird way, the Sex Pistols predicted that forty-three years ago. "God Save the Queen" was a message that England had to future, and was instead condemned to cling to its glorious and faded past. No one represents that more than Her Majesty. In a country that elects someone like Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister, who wouldn't want to praise a steadfast monarch and remember how things used to be?

When I first listened to the Sex Pistols in my teen years, this was the song I loved the most. Johnny Rotten's mad prophet sneer never sounded better, and the drum and guitar assault of Steve Jones and Paul Cook was never more pounding. As a Gen Xer living in a pretty turgid and listless 1990s, I certainly got a thrill out of such daring music so critical of a complacent society.

This song has become even more relevant in the past two months. When I look at how America has failed to formulate a proper response to the virus, how it is incapable of collective action, and of how it has such a complete and utter malicious fool at the top refusing to do anything about it, I realize that there is no future in America's dreaming, either.

Our response to this has mostly been just to give up, so that people can get haircuts and tattoos. If a bunch of people die, so what? That is a stance far more nihilist than the most shocking punk rock band.

The Damned, "New Rose"

Last week I had the good fortune to see my friend Greg's band The Downstrokes perform at the Bowery Electric. The club is just a block north of where CBGBs used to be, and continues its spirit. Down in the basement a bunch of bands played hard, fast and loud.

Since then I have been revisiting the first wave of punk rock, music that had first energized me in my teen years. All the grunge bands I loved referred to this stuff as an influence, and the first time I popped Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols into the tape deck of my 1992 Mazda Protege I fell in love. This music was so much more vital, energizing, and just plain electrifying than anything I was hearing in the early 90s.

Around that time Rhino put out a series of compilations on early punk, and I played the one on the first wave of UK punk almost to death. This was where I first learned of X Ray Spex, Wire, and The Damned.

The latter were the first UK punk band to release a single and an album. That first single, "New Rose," was about the phenomenon of punk rock itself. The "rose" of the title is not a new girlfriend, but the new punk rock sound. It's about falling in love with this new music, and that swooning, intoxicating feeling of a new infatuation. (Appropriately enough, the Downstrokes' latest album is called Fall In Love With Punk Rock Again.)

That first wave of punk felt less like a new music and more like a new religion. The young and hungry Savonarolas had burst into the gilded palaces of 70s rock to smash the idols and erect a bonfire of the vanities to burn to the ground. It was such an exciting moment that there were people still chasing it in a bowery basement 43 years later. No song channels that feeling better than "New Rose."

"21st Century Digital Boy" (Track of the Week)

I have been thinking a lot about 90s popular culture this week, and the few artifacts that showed an understanding of the way our society was headed. Back in 1994 the whole "pop punk" broke huge at the hands of Green Day and The Offspring. The latter band's album became the biggest selling album put out by an indie label in America. That label was Epitaph, founded by Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz.

Bad Religion, birthed in the early 80s hardcore scene, even managed to get their videos on MTV and songs played on the new "alternative" radio format. While Green Day was expertly mining teen angst, Bad Religion was older and far more literate and political. Their Stranger Than Fiction album had hooks galore and came out in the only three year window in pop music history where an indie punk band could hit the mainstream.

On the surface, "21st Century Digital Boy" describes a typical suburban scene of a middle class boy "with lots of toys" seduced by consumerism and incapable of dealing with the outside world. Hearing it now, I see the first inklings of a new trend. If the character in this song were young today he'd be in GamerGate and trolling people for the lulz and egging on mass shooters on 4chan. The lost affluent suburban nerdy white boys of the 90s have become politicized these days, often drawn to the alt-right and "incel" misogyny. (I know most aren't but this nexus is pretty clear.)

Some days I think about how things would have been different for me if I grew up now rather than then. I shook off the "woe is me" bullshit, but it was easier then without social media. Now the lost 21st century digital boys are empowered in their hatred.

X, "We're Desperate"

Last week I re-watched the original Decline and Fall of Western Civilization documentary about the early 1980s LA hardcore punk scene. It's an amazing cultural document of a subculture, one that we're lucky to have. I do have to say watching it made me cringe a bit.

For about three years in my teens (16-19) punk rock was the music that mattered most to me. It was the most real, the most primal, the most immediate. As a meek, good little Catholic altar boy, it also spoke directly to all of my buried anger and feelings of alienation. I was not a well-liked kid at school, but putting on a punk record made me feel like I was part of a secret fraternity of people a whole lot cooler than the jocks and burnouts who mocked me in turn. (Both of these types jump on a meek weirdo like sharks on chum.)

For a time my views on music got stupidly doctrinaire, and I was obsessed with authenticity, something I now find to be highly overrated. Anyway, because no club ever wanted me, I never became a punk. I didn't chop my hair at an odd angle or wear safety pins in my face. Because I lived in the middle of nowhere, there were no all ages shows to go to. Then as now I am very wary of subcultures, they remind me too much of religious zealotry. I remember hanging out with some goths in my Chicago days. They were nice people, but the efforts they put into being goth seemed ridiculously overwrought. So I listened to and loved punk, but never came close to being punk.

LA punk was cruder and even less musical than other forms of punk rock. It produced only two bands that I can still listen to and enjoy: Black Flag and X. In the documentary both come across as thoughtful, rather than just being droogs out to shock people for the hell of it. X is also interesting for not entirely following the punk formula. Guitarist Billy Zoom could actually play, and there's a touch of rockabilly in his riffs and solos. The lyrics of John Doe and Exene Cervenka could be shocking, but it was a deeper, more considered kind of shocking. "We're Desperate" is among my favorites by them. It's pretty self-explanatory: the narrators are desperate characters behind on the rent and one step ahead of the bill collector. It's the stop-start sound of living a life on the margins that's falling apart. Lesser punk bands would have turned it into a diatribe, X make it a kind of character study.

My favorite part about X, of course, were their vocals. Male-female vocal duets are not the first thing to spring to mind when anyone mentions punk rock, but here we have a kind of extremely twisted, gutter rat version of Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. A friend of mine one joked that they made "harm" not harmonies. Their voices clash, but it is a beautifully damaged clash. Punk rock's raw spontaneity was always its saving grace, even if I cringe now at much of the rest of it.

The Clash "Straight To Hell"

My relationship with The Clash started right at the moment that I began to develop an interest in more challenging music. I remember a cold winter day in 1991, the light of the sun faint over the snow-strewn flatlands of my Nebraska hometown as I drove to the local mall and browsed the Musicland, the one record store in town. I picked up the Story of the Clash compilation, which is maybe the worst place to start, since the track listing is pretty much nonsensical and the track choices dubious.  I'd heard they were an important band, and the local FM station, perhaps because it was located out in the sticks, still allowed their DJs to play personal favorites. One DJ evidently liked "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" and "Rock The Casbah," since I heard them on a regular basis, even though they came out almost a decade before.

Perhaps because of the Nebraska winter surroundings, I gravitated more to the spookier sounding tracks initially, including "Straight To Hell." It's a sign of how much the Clash evolved musically, since it sounds nothing like the distorted guitar attacks of their early days.  There's barely any guitar here, the rhythm is intricate and slow, and synthesizers dominate.  At times everything drops out except for the spare percussion.  It perfectly expresses a certain feelings of alienation and rootlessness, something I didn't understand until I started listening closer to the lyrics.

"Straight to Hell" is a song I always seem to return to this time of year, although political events have me thinking about it this time around. It's a song commenting on the hostility to Vietnamese refugees in America, particularly those who had American fathers.  People tend to forget this, but there was very violent opposition to refugees from Vietnam in the 70s and 80s, despite the fact that America's foreign policy was the primary reason so many were having to flee their homes.  The song's name comes from the expressions of xenophobia that greeted the refugees, many of whom had to survive unspeakable horrors to make it to these shores.

We don't hear much about the violent opposition to Vietnamese refugees these days, mostly because it would be embarrassing to talk about, considering that those refugees and their descendants have become such valuable members of American society.  I only hope that Syrians fleeing such horrific warfare are given the same opportunity to prove the bigots wrong.

Classic Albums: Wire, Pink Flag

[Editor's Note: time revive an old series that's been dormant too long]

Every now and again I hear something that sounds like nothing I've ever heard before, but it entrances me before I even have a chance to feel the surprise.  No band ever did this to me like Wire, which I got interested in through my teenage obsession with 70s punk rock.  In those pre-Internet days, I didn't hear their music until I picked up the album, apart from one song, "12XU," which was on one of those glorious early-90s Rhino punk compilations.  Little did I know that "12XU" was by far the most conventional song on the album, by punk rock standards.  It's very ahead of its time, with the loud-quiet-loud structure imitated by the grunge bands I also liked at the time.

On their first album, Wire relegates that song to last on an album of 21 songs, most of them well under two minutes long.  It seemed as if they put their one potential hit at the end as an afterthought, which is a punk move if there ever was one.  The record begins on a very different note, with the slower paced "Reuters."  The title refers to the wire news service, and the lyrics are like a report from a war zone, the music building behind, getting progressively more dissonant until chaos ensues as the dogs of war have been let loose.  This is less punk than art rock with a punk sensibility.  It's loud, simple, and raw, unlike say Yes or Genesis, but it plays around and subverts the rock form, making the songs into cubist paintings for your ears.

Case in point is the next song, "Field Day For The Sundays," which is rousing and catchy and only lasts 28 seconds.  It then goes into the longer and slower "Three Girl Rhumba," a song lifted by the band Elastica in the mid-90s.  Wire give the listener whiplash by alternating between fast songs stuck in overdrive like "Ex Lion Tamer" and merciless grinders like "Lowdown."  That sense of disorientation extends to the lyrics, which are often obscure and wry.  The whole experience is a kind of immersive foray into the quotidian confusion of modern life with a postmodern viewpoint.  Just as the 70s were the germination point for philosophical postmodernism, Wire and the best of English punk were musical postmodernists, defying the rules of rock and the expectations of the audience.  Wire went one step beyond, and defied the expectations of the punk audience itself by refusing to be obviously topical in its lyrics or "rebellious" in he usual gob-spitting fashion.  That's probably one of the big reasons why they're still around today.

One thing I love about Pink Flag is that just when you think you've got a handle on the world Wire is building, they throw you a curve.  The title song closing out the front side is so vicious that it makes "Reuters" sound like the Carpenters.  "Surgeon's Girl" is accelerated to the point of being non-sensical.  By contrast "Fragile" almost sounds mellow, at least in Wire's musical universe.  Colin Greenwood even gives it some vocal flourishes.  Punk's biggest demerit is its strict formula, but Wire never let themselves be straight-jacketed by it.  By the time you finish the record with the aforementioned "12XU" it's almost as if Wire are saying "yeah, we can do that hard riffing, cymbal crashing thing to perfection if we want to, but we'd rather do other stuff."

That right there is pretty much the reason that Wire is remembered, while the much more stereotypically "punk" acts like Generation X and Sham 69 are footnotes to musical history.

Track of the Week: Wire "Mr Suit"

There are few bands that have grabbed me on first listen like Wire.  I first heard "12XU" on a Rhino's great DIY punk rock compilation series, and was struck by their brutal yet catchy minimalism.  While on a student trip to Germany the summer after high school I spent a lot of time in record stores, mostly because my options for music in my hometown were so limited.  I picked up the On Returning compilation, where I realized that "12XU" was actually pretty accessible compared to some of Wire's other tracks.  Nevertheless,  I probably spent too much of my time in the my host family's house absorbing the music I was buying rather than seeing the sights.  Thus are the perils of being a teenage music geek.

Wire had the philosophy that a song shouldn't overstay its welcome, meaning that their debut album Pink Flag  clocks in at only 35 minutes, but has over twenty songs.  Some of the songs stretch to a (for them) epic three minutes.  Others come in and out like a fast car through a small town without a streetlight.  "Mr Suit" is my favorite of these songs, it's a minute and half of pure propulsion.  The guitar tone has some ineffable quality that I still can't get over all these years later.  The lyrics are also a profane kiss off to a be-suited boss, which is pretty damn punk.

There really isn't another band out there like Wire, one that could combine the punk aesthetic with a non-obnoxious artiness.  In its own way it was a lot more challenging to its listeners than the Sex Pistols ranting about "Anarchy in the UK."

Classic Albums: Television, Marquee Moon

There is nothing like the thrill of revisiting an old favorite album after too much time apart, and realizing it was just as good, or even better than you always thought it to be.  That experience happened to me yesterday during my commute home.  I was waiting for the subway and scrolling through my old, 2007 vintage iPod, and decided to give Television's Marquee Moon a spin.  I'd been listening to a lot of Velvet Underground, so I guess I was in the mood for something New York punky.

"See No Evil" got off to its rollicking start as I hopped on the 1 train, and the combination of its exhilarating push and the subway train's rushing down the track brought the glory of this song home to me in a way I'd never felt before.  I first heard the song as part of the storied Rhino records punk compilation series (sadly out of print) as was completely floored.  I thought of punk as basic three chords heavy music, but these guys had chops, and the guitar solo that the song builds up to in a frenzied climax has got to be one of the most sublime things I've ever heard in my life.  Jimi Hendrix's epic introduction to "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" is the only rock guitar moment that beats it, for my money.

Hearing that song in high school on a New York punk compilation intrigued me, but considering I lived in rural Nebraska before the internet age, I couldn't get my hands on any Television albums.  That changed on my German class trip the summer after I graduated, where I found myself buying up obscure punk records with every spare moment.  I bought Marquee Moon for 120 kroner on a day trip to Malmo, Sweden.  (I bought Jimi Hendrix's Life at Monterey the same day, so I guess I hit paydirt on that trip.)  I didn't get a chance to hear it until I got back home to the states.  After the blazing "See No Evil" finished, I didn't know what I was going to hear next.  The unexpectedly mid-tempo and gorgeous "Venus" followed, and I think that's where I really got hooked on Television.  The guitars have a wondrous, ringing tone to them, echoing the classic beauty of the Venus de Milo referenced in the song.

The third song, "Friction," goes back to the punky, nervy edginess of "See No Evil," but it's a smooth transition.  Just as Television broke from the punk pack with their guitar heroics, they also had a much more sophisticated grasp of rhythm than their CBGBs peers.  In a lot of ways, they took the good elements from prog rock (musicianship, complex rhythms) and filtered them through the gritty punk aesthetic.  Punks were supposed to hate prog rock and its frippery, but Television managed to have a touch of Genesis without losing their street cred.

And speaking of prog rock, Television followed "Friction" with an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer worthy epic, the eponymous title track.  Stretched out longer than ten minutes, it starts of sounding like the Cadillac of the lyrics, slinking through the dark city streets, before being transformed into a flying saucer soaring the stars.  There are few ten minute songs that are so intense that they sound like five minute songs, and this is among them.  It also weirdly showcases Tom Verlaine's voice, which can be described most charitably as "unorthodox."  His slightly quacking tone actually seems to work here, adding to the macabre sense of midnight dread.  Thus closes out what might be the best side one of any record in my collection.

Even if side two can't match such heights, it's still really, really damn good.  The guitars on "Elevation" end up burning like magnesium flares after beginning the song casting the subtler light of tapered candles.  "Guiding Light" breaks from the punk script with some piano at the center of a tender, lovely ballad, which still has room for an absolutely soul stirring solo at the end.  "Prove It" artfully brings back the New York nerves, and "Torn Curtain" begins with an epically sublime guitar figure that sounds, well, like the curtain guarding the holy of holies being ripped.

There just isn't much out there better than this.  Marquee Moon also has a sentimental spot in my heart, since I was listening to it intensely at a time -age eighteen- when I was finally coming into my own as a human being.  It was the start of a journey of self-understanding that led me to be standing on a subway platform in the heart of New York City, engaged in silent musical reverie with the same album almost twenty years later.

Still Punk Rockin'

As I've gotten older my musical tastes have changed, and certain things I once loved I barely tolerate, while others that I once disparaged have become near and dear to my heart. My teenage self would tear his hair out if he knew that his 37 year old incarnation liked ABBA, Steely Dan, and secretly rocked out to Journey.

When I was a teenager I treated music like a religion, and around the time I turned 17 I threw myself into punk rock, the most fundamentalist of all musical denominations. Mainstream acts of the time like Garth Brooks and Ace of Base weren't just lame, they were musical blasphemers and apostates whose false idols needed to be broken into pieces by the righteous. Like most religious fundamentalists I had no problem denigrating the faiths of others, and in fact remember provoking a yelling match with someone on my debate team after I mocked her love of Trisha Yearwood. (And this was a girl that I LIKED! No wonder I couldn't get laid.)

Shunning Top 40 radio, I immersed myself in the work of the Holy Trinity: the Sex Pistols, Ramones, and The Clash. I still remember playing "London's Burning" in my car while driving my sister and one of her teammates to golf practice, with the latter telling me that I listened to "weird music." Of course, that only got me to listen to punk rock all that much more, knowing that it set me apart from the lobotomized clones that walked the halls of my high school. During my junior year I drove out for lunch in my car with the strains of "Holidays in the Sun" blaring out the window of my Mazda Protege and felt like I was a real badass. Perhaps it was also my imitation Doc Martens, bought at Payless Shoes for the princely sum of twenty bucks. (Yes folks, these were the Grunge Years.)

This rebellious music certainly made me self-righteous, but that wasn't all bad. My feelings of superiority to my peers helped me weather the last years of high school: instead of feeling like I was dirt because I didn't have many friends or any dates, I felt like I was just too damn cool and complex for any of them to understand. (This eventually lead to me wearing all black and reading Nietsche in the hallway in my senior year, cultivating a studied aloofness. Again, I shouldn't be surprised by my lack of girlfriends at the time.)  When I went to a scholar's camp one summer at the University of Nebraska, my love of punk immediately won me friends from other podunk towns who were the only ones in their county with a copy of Rocket to Russia.

When I finally got out of my hometown and went to college, I was elated that my roommate Joe was an even bigger punk rock fan than I was. (Considering the heavy frat element on my dorm floor, we both agreed that this was one of those rare lucky breaks.) He was into hardcore and straight-edge, which meant screaming along to Minor Threat in the morning in order to work up the energy to make it to Introduction to World Literature.  We would also jam out to The Minutemen, Descendants, and early Husker Du, constantly trying to introduce each other to something new.

Later in college, once the storms of adolescent emotion had subsided, my musical tastes became more ecumenical. In the past few years I've listened less and less to the old punk rock stuff. This is partially because the genre formerly known as punk rock has become so heavily adulterated by crappy acts like Blink 182 and Avril Lavigne, but mostly because it is hormonal music for tortured adolescents. These days I tend to listen to pensive music for aging bohemians.

Recently, however, while cycling through my iPod I came across some classic punk, and it put its hooks in me again. Living a life that gets more compromised with each passing day, it was refreshing to hear the Boomtown Rats yell out, "I wanna be like ME!", indulge in the darker side of life via the heroin tales of Johnny Thunders' "Chinese Rocks," and bang my head to "One Chord Wonders", the Adverts' defiant anthem of musical ineptitude. In this ever more homogenized culture we live in the songs retain their irresistable bite, as relevant as ever.